[RFC]: (Controversial) Drop Legacy BIOS support.

not-my-segfault commented 2 years ago

Date proposed

18/10/2022

Link to merge request if applicable

No response

Short summary

I believe that we should work towards dropping Legacy BIOS support and moving to be EFI only on x86_64 platforms

Motivation

As hardware evolves, so should software. Legacy BIOS has been around for an unimaginable amount of years and is a dated spec with no real standard and is inherently less secure.

The UEFI spec has been around since 1998 and has been open to the world since 2005. We are choosing to support a spec that was replaced before some of our developers were even born.

Moreover, most machines that still only support Legacy BIOS are nearing a decade of age. These machines would most likely still also run on an HDD and would be entirely unsuitable for Crystal, it's default Desktop and it's features.

This would also help us standardize how our boot system works, and could even allow us to move to other EFI-only bootloaders such as rEFInd or even systemd-boot.

In the end, we are only shooting ourselves in the foot and opening ourselves to more potential errors by allowing users to install Crystal on Legacy BIOS systems. As well as inhibiting ourselves from implementing security features like Secure Boot and fwupd across our entire board of users.

Changes

The changes that this would involve would be as follows:

[ ] Legacy BIOS support is not to be implemented in Tourmaline
[ ] Legacy BIOS checks are removed from Jade GUI
[ ] Users will be warned in Jade GUI that Crystal no longer support Legacy BIOS

Drawbacks

We would alienate a small portion of the Crystal Linux community that still relies on Legacy BIOS

However, installed Legacy BIOS systems will continue to function
This might be seen as a controversial change in the Linux community and in some of our financial and code contributors

However, as an arch-based system users can still manually install a BIOS boot loader, we will simply not recommend it and disallow it in our own tools

Alternatives

We could simply not remove Legacy BIOS support, however this would leave us with more cases to support and more code to manage and maintain (which is, again, based on a spec that has no real standard)

Unanswered questions

No response

not-my-segfault commented 2 years ago

As this would be a Major change, I also believe this should constitute a Major Vote.

not-my-segfault commented 2 years ago

Also to note: Fedora has also discussed this for Fedora 37 and Microsoft has implemented it for Windows 11, as has Intel since 2020

axtloss commented 2 years ago

I fully agree with this change, considering different distros are planning on doing this change too and pretty much every PC nowadays supports uefi. It would also make transitioning to newer bootloaders that don't support uefi (systemd-boot, refind) way easier

SomethingGeneric commented 2 years ago

Send it

orowith2os commented 2 years ago

I'm in disagreement, mainly for the reason that I have a computer that I use daily without UEFI support, and have multiple others that don't have that as well.

So a bit biased, but still in disagreement.

SomethingGeneric commented 2 years ago

^ We should have somewhere we at least link to the ArchWiki grub page for those who will need to install grub legacy manually

SomethingGeneric commented 2 years ago

Moved to GitLab https://git.getcryst.al/crystal/info/-/issues/5

crystal-linux / .github